The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today revised final draft technical standards and Guidelines on the further specification of the indicators of global systemic importance and their disclosure. The need for this revision was prompted by the new data template and some minor changes introduced by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) in January 2015 for the identification of global systemically important banks (G-SIBs). The full data template with the detailed specification of the indicator values will now only be incorporated in the EBA Guidelines and will be updated on an annual basis.

The list of EU G-SIBs identified by the BCBS and the global systemically important institutions (G-SIIs) identified by Member States' authorities are identical. In January 2016, the BCBS published a new data template with minor revisions for the year 2016 identification exercise, based on end-2015 business year data.

As a consequence, the Commission's Delegated Regulation (EU) No 1222/2014 on the identification methodology and the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 1030/2014 on disclosure, which contained a data template, have been updated. For practical reasons, the full data template with the detailed specification of the indicator values have now been incorporated in the revised Guidelines.

The revised Guidelines stipulate that not only G-SIIs, but also other large institutions with an overall exposure of more than EUR 200 billion Euro and which are potentially systemically relevant, will be subject to the same disclosure requirement as the G-SIIs. The EBA will act as a central data hub in this disclosure process, thus providing a platform to aggregate data across the whole EU.

Legal basis and background

These Guidelines have been developed according to Directive 2013/36/EU (CRD IV), and on the basis of internationally agreed standards, such as the framework established by the FSB, as well as the standards developed by the BCBS.

The Capital Requirements Directive, (CRD IV) requires G-SIIs (G-SIBs, in BCBS terminology) to hold higher capital levels in order to contain the risks they pose to the financial system and the impact that their potential failure may have on sovereign finance and taxpayers, the so-called ‘too big to fail' problem.

The identification of global systemically important institutions in the EU is aligned with the framework established by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and developed by the BCBS. These guidelines will be part of the EU Single Rulebook in banking and aim at enhancing regulatory harmonisation and disclosure across the EU.